I know from experience that attorney-client privilege plays a big role in a lawyer’s professional life. There’s plenty of times when a client or potential client wanted assurance that I couldn’t tell anyone else what they told me (with limited exceptions). The confidentiality of information is such an important ethical obligation that the American Bar […]

For the second time in a year, I’ve had book encounters with 19th century European assassins who eventually fled to the United States and began new lives under different names. The first was Sergei Degaev, who assassinated the chief of Tsar Nicholas’s security organization in 1883. Sixteen years later he would become a popular professor […]

Ask any trial attorney and they’ll likely tell you that the trial is the easiest part of a case. That’s because all the investigation, research, and preparation is complete. Equally important, the issues to be presented have been narrowed as motions and hearings before trial shaped and settled often significant procedural and substantive legal questions. […]

The Serial podcast about Adnan Syed’s murder conviction sparked a profusion of so-called “true crime” podcasts, many focusing on unsolved murders or assessing whether particular deaths were the result of foul play. While several of those are worth listening to, The Murder of Sonny Liston displays the advantage of the written word.

Plague. Even today, the word retains fearsome connotations. But according to Jill Leovy, there’s been a plague in America for several decades: the murder of black males, mostly by other black males. In Los Angeles County, for example, even though black men were just six percent of the population, they accounted for 40 percent of […]